This Republic of Suffering

Chapter 3
“Maryland and Pennsylvania Farmers Visiting the Battlefield of Antietam While the National Troops Were Burying the Dead and Carrying Off the Wounded”

Chapter 3
“Transportation of the Dead!”

Chapter 3
Business card for undertaker Lewis Ernde

Chapter 3
“Embalming Surgeon at Work on Soldier's Body”

Chapter 3
“Dr. Bunnell's Embalming Establishment in the Field (Army of the James)”

Chapter 4
Searching the casualty lists. Detail from “News of the War” by Winslow Homer

Chapter 4
“The United States Christian Commission Office at 8th and H Streets, Washington, D.C., 1865”

Chapter 4
“Nurses and Officers of the United States Sanitary Commission at Fredericksburg, Virginia, During the Wilderness Campaign, 1864”

Chapter 4
Telegram from William Drayton Rutherford to Sallie Fair Rutherford

Chapter 4
Advertisement for soldiers' identification badges

Chapter 4
Note by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Chapter 4
Detail from “News of the War” by Winslow Homer

Chapter 4
“Ward K at Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C.”

Chapter 4
“An Unknown Soldier”

Chapter 4
Henry Clay Taylor

Chapter 4
“Libby Prison, Richmond Virginia, April 1865”

Chapter 5
“View of the Darlington Court-House and the Sycamore Tree Where Amy Spain, the Negro Slave, was Hung”

Chapter 5
John Saunders Palmer with his wife of less than a year, Alice Ann Gaillard Palmer

Chapter 5
Half-mourning dress of Varina Howell Davis

Chapter 5
“Women in Mourning, Cemetery in New Orleans”

Chapter 5
“View of the âBurnt District,' Richmond, Va.”

Chapter 5
“Godey's Fashions for June 1862.”

Chapter 5
“Women in Mourning at Stonewall Jackson's Grave, circa 1866”

Chapter 5
“President Lincoln's FuneralâCitizens Viewing the Body at the City Hall, New York”

Chapter 5
Henry Ingersoll Bowditch at the time of the Civil War

Chapter 6
“The Dying Soldier”

Chapter 6
“Battle-field of Gaines Mill, Virginia”

Chapter 7
Clara Barton, circa 1865

Chapter 7
“A Burial Party on the Battle-field of Cold Harbor, Virginia, April 1865”

Chapter 7
“Miss Clara Barton Raising the National Flag, August 17, 1865”

Chapter 7
“The Soldier's Grave”

Chapter 7
“Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, VirginiaâDecorating the Graves of the Rebel Soldiers”

Chapter 7
“Confederate Cemetery of Vicksburg”

Chapter 8
Walt Whitman

Preface

THE WORK OF DEATH

Mortality defines the human condition. “We all have our deadâwe all have our Graves,” a Confederate Episcopal bishop observed in an
1862
sermon. Every era, he explained, must confront “like miseries” every age must search for “like consolation.” Yet death has its discontinuities as well. Men and women approach death in ways shaped by history, by culture, by conditions that vary over time and across space. Even though “we all have our dead,” and even though we all die, we do so differently from generation to generation and from place to place.
¹

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century. The number of soldiers who died between
1861
and
1865,
an estimated
620,000,
is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of
1812,
the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. The Civil War's rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times that of World War II. A similar rate, about
2
percent, in the United States today would mean six million fatalities. As the new southern nation struggled for survival against a wealthier and more populous enemy, its death toll reflected the disproportionate strains on its human capital. Confederate men died at a rate three times that of their Yankee counterparts; one in five white southern men of military age did not survive the Civil War.
²

But these military statistics tell only a part of the story. The war killed civilians as well, as battles raged across farm and field, as encampments of troops spread epidemic disease, as guerrillas ensnared women and even children in violence and reprisals, as draft rioters targeted innocent citizens, as shortages of food in parts of the South brought starvation. No one sought to document these deaths systematically, and no one has devised a method of undertaking a retrospective count. The distinguished Civil War historian James McPherson has estimated that there were fifty thousand civilian deaths during the war, and he has concluded that the overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II. The American Civil War produced carnage that has often been thought reserved for the combination of technological proficiency and inhumanity characteristic of a later time.
³

The impact and meaning of the war's death toll went beyond the sheer numbers who died. Death's significance for the Civil War generation arose as well from its violation of prevailing assumptions about life's proper endâabout who should die, when and where, and under what circumstances. Death was hardly unfamiliar to mid-nineteenth-century Americans. By the beginning of the
1860
s the rate of death in the United States had begun to decline, although dramatic improvements in longevity would not appear until late in the century. Americans of the immediate prewar era continued to be more closely acquainted with death than are their twenty-first-century counterparts. But the patterns to which they were accustomed were in significant ways different from those the war would introduce. The Civil War represented a dramatic shift in both incidence and experience. Mid-nineteenth-century Americans endured a high rate of infant mortality but expected that most individuals who reached young adulthood would survive at least into middle age. The war took young, healthy men and rapidly, often instantly, destroyed them with disease or injury. This marked a sharp and alarming departure from existing preconceptions about who should die. As Francis W. Palfrey wrote in an
1864
memorial for Union soldier Henry L. Abbott, “the blow seems heaviest when it strikes down those who are in the morning of life.” A soldier was five times more likely to die than he would have been if he had not entered the army. As a chaplain explained to his Connecticut regiment in the middle of the war, “neither he nor they had ever lived and faced death in such a time, with its peculiar conditions and necessities.” Civil War soldiers and civilians alike distinguished what many referred to as “ordinary death,” as it had occurred in prewar years, from the manner and frequency of death in Civil War battlefields, hospitals, and camps, and from the war's interruptions of civilian lives.
⁴

In the Civil War the United States, North and South, reaped what many participants described as a “harvest of death.” By the midpoint of the conflict, it seemed that in the South, “nearly every household mourns some loved one lost.” Loss became commonplace; death was no longer encountered individually; death's threat, its proximity, and its actuality became the most widely shared of the war's experiences. As a Confederate soldier observed, death “reigned with universal sway,” ruling homes and lives, demanding attention and response. The Civil War matters to us today because it ended slavery and helped to define the meanings of freedom, citizenship, and equality. It established a newly centralized nation-state and launched it on a trajectory of economic expansion and world influence. But for those Americans who lived in and through the Civil War, the texture of the experience, its warp and woof, was the presence of death. At war's end this shared suffering would override persisting differences about the meanings of race, citizenship, and nationhood to establish sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite. Even in our own time this fundamentally elegiac understanding of the Civil War retains a powerful hold.
⁵

Death transformed the American nation as well as the hundreds of thousands of individuals directly affected by loss. The war created a veritable “republic of suffering,” in the words that Frederick Law Olmsted chose to describe the wounded and dying arriving at Union hospital ships on the Virginia Peninsula. Sacrifice and the state became inextricably intertwined. Citizen soldiers snatched from the midst of life generated obligations for a nation defining its purposes and polity through military struggle. A war about union, citizenship, freedom, and human dignity required that the government attend to the needs of those who had died in its service. Execution of these newly recognized responsibilities would prove an important vehicle for the expansion of federal power that characterized the transformed postwar nation. The establishment of national cemeteries and the emergence of the Civil War pension system to care for both the dead and their survivors yielded programs of a scale and reach unimaginable before the war. Death created the modern American unionânot just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments.
⁶

Civil War Americans often wrote about what they called “the work of death,” meaning the duties of soldiers to fight, kill, and die, but at the same time invoking battle's consequences: its slaughter, suffering, and devastation. “Work” in this usage incorporated both effort and impactâand the important connection between the two. Death in war does not simply happen; it requires action and agents. It must, first of all, be inflicted; and several million soldiers of the
1860
s dedicated themselves to that purpose. But death also usually requires participation and response; it must be experienced and handled. It is work to die, to know how to approach and endure life's last moments. Of all living things, only humans consciously anticipate death; the consequent need to choose how to behave in its faceâto worry about how to dieâdistinguishes us from other animals. The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.
⁷

It is work to deal with the dead as well, to remove them in the literal sense of disposing of their bodies, and it is also work to remove them in a more figurative sense. The bereaved struggle to separate themselves from the dead through ritual and mourning. Families and communities must repair the rent in the domestic and social fabric, and societies, nations, and cultures must work to understand and explain unfathomable loss.

“The True Defenders of the Constitution.” Engraving from a drawing by James Walker.
Harper's Weekly,
November 11, 1865
.

This is a book about the work of death in the American Civil War. It seeks to describe how between
1861
and
1865
âand into the decades that followedâAmericans undertook a kind of work that history has not adequately understood or recognized. Human beings are rarely simply passive victims of death. They are actors even if they are the diers; they prepare for death, imagine it, risk it, endure it, seek to understand it. And if they are survivors, they must assume new identities established by their persistence in face of others' annihilation. The presence and fear of death touched Civil War Americans' most fundamental sense of who they were, for in its threat of termination and transformation, death inevitably inspired self-scrutiny and self-definition. Beginning with individuals' confrontation with dying and killing, the book explores how those experiences transformed society, culture, and politics in what became a broader republic of shared suffering. Some of the changes death brought were social, as wives turned into widows, children into orphans; some were political, as African American soldiers hoped to win citizenship and equality through their willingness both to die and to kill; some were philosophical and spiritual, as the carnage compelled Americans to seek meaning and explanation for war's destruction.

Every death involved “the great change” captured in the language and discourse of nineteenth-century Christianity, the shift from this life to whatever might come next. A subject of age-old concern for believers and nonbelievers alike, the existence and nature of an afterlife took on new urgency both for soldiers anxious about their own deaths and for bereaved kin speculating on the fate of the departed. And even if spirits and souls proved indeed immortal, there still remained the vexing question of bodies. The traditional notion that corporeal resurrection and restoration would accompany the Day of Judgment seemed increasingly implausible to many Americans who had seen the maiming and disfigurement inflicted by this war. Witnesses at field hospitals almost invariably commented with horror on the piles of limbs lying near the surgeon's table, dissociated from the bodies to which they had belonged, transformed into objects of revulsion instead of essential parts of people. These arms and legs seemed as unidentifiableâand unrestorableâas the tens of thousands of missing men who had been separated from their names. The integral relationship between the body and the human self it housed was as shattered as the wounded men.
⁸

Bodies were in important ways the measure of the warâof its achievements and its impact; and indeed, bodies became highly visible in Civil War America. Commanders compared their own and enemy casualties as evidence of military success or failure. Soldiers struggled for the words to describe mangled corpses strewn across battlefields; families contemplated the significance of newspaper lists of wounds: “slightly, in the shoulder,” “severely, in the groin,” “mortally, in the breast.” They nursed the dying and buried their remains. Letters and reports from the front rendered the physicality of injuries and death all but unavoidable. For the first time civilians directly confronted the reality of battlefield death rendered by the new art of photography. They found themselves transfixed by the paradoxically lifelike renderings of the slain of Antietam that Mathew Brady exhibited in his studio on Broadway. If Brady “has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it,” wrote the
New York Times.
⁹

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